BORDERLAND

Holland man admits he dumped asbestos

BLADE STAFF

A Holland man admitted Tuesday that he removed and dumped asbestos from the former Champion Spark Plug plant on Upton Avenue.

Ronald Gibson, 56, pleaded guilty in Lucas County Common Pleas Court to engaging in asbestos hazard-abatement activity without a license, engaging in asbestos-removal work without prior written notice to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, and illegal disposal of construction and demolition debris.

Gibson told the court he was hired to remove the asbestos in the fall of 2012 and did so even though he knew it was illegal because he was “hurting for money.” He said he disposed of the materials in Dumpsters at a Dorr Street mobile home park and an abandoned house off Old State Line Road.

Many of the students who attended the three campuses have been bused to schools elsewhere in Orange County at a cost of $50,000 a week while school officials struggled to deal with the asbestos concerns.

On Tuesday, students in grades 3 through 5 will return to Oak View Elementary and be reunited with classmates in portable buildings.

Two other campuses, Lake View and Hope View elementary, remained closed.

Since Oak View was closed in October, more than 600 Oak View students, including kindergartners, have been attending classes at Village View Elementary, Oak View Preschool, Pleasant View School – all in the Ocean View district – and Walter Knott Elementary in Buena Park.

The district is working on a timeline for asbestos cleanup at Oak View. The potentially hazardous mineral fiber was discovered at some schools during an 11-campus modernization project that began in July.

When the schools were built decades ago, asbestos was used as fireproofing on metal beams above the ceilings. Over time, asbestos dust began to fall from the beams and settle on classroom ceiling tiles, district records show.

Rising costs caused the district board of trustees to vote last month to delay asbestos removal and modernization construction at Oak View.

According to district documents, air samples taken at Oak View in October did not contain asbestos levels above standards set in the federal Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act, which regulates how much asbestos can be present in public buildings like schools.

At a recent board meeting, several parents of Oak View students said they were worried about their children falling behind academically while attending temporary schools.

The children lack access to computers at Knott Elementary and can’t practice for automated Common Core tests like their peers can, parents said.

Oak View serves a large number of English as a Second Language students and low-income families, many of whom receive free or reduced-price meals at school, according to California Department of Education data. The relocations have divided siblings and disrupted families, some of whom count on social and family services available at Oak View, teachers told the school board last month.

Special-education teacher Rhonda King said one of her second-graders was accustomed to attending Oak View with his sister, a third-grader. Now he is at Village View in Huntington Beach while his sister is bused to Buena Park.

“He tells me he misses his sister,” King said. “That’s not just one family, it’s a lot of families.”

Residents affected by ex-tropical cyclone Christine are warned over the risk of exposure to asbestos after buildings were hammered earlier in the week.

The cyclonic winds and pelting rain may have passed by Western Australia’s Pilbara and Kimberley regions, however, ex-tropical cyclone Christine has exposed a fresh yet familiar danger for residents to contend with.

Asbestos in buildings, fencing and other building products dislodged or damaged during the wild weather now pose an additional health risk to Pilbara residents if they are exposed to the cancer-causing material.

Slater and Gordon asbestos lawyer Laine McDonald issued the warning to residents of the risks of asbestos exposure during the cleaning up of properties, homes and businesses battered by Christine.

“Once asbestos is disturbed, it can pose a real danger to health,” Ms McDonald said.

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“Residents who are returning to their homes and businesses could be at risk of exposure, especially if they start cleaning up without the right protection.

“While it’s difficult to tell if a structure contains asbestos, if it was built in the mid-1980s – the time when this common building product was phased out – you assume there’s a risk.”

It’s believe about 600 Australian are diagnosed with mesothelioma each year.

Asbestos was commonly used as a construction material throughout the Pilbara.

It was mined in Wittenoom, 1100 kilometres north-east of Perth in the Pilbara, before the town was evacuated and essentially wiped off the map by authorities.

“Each year around 250 Western Australians die from asbestos-related diseases, with a lag of about 30-40 years between exposure and diagnosis of an illness.

“Asbestos products are still in our homes, businesses and communities more than 40 years after the Wittenoom mine closed, so it’s a hazard that continues to confront us all.”

Despite the category three cyclone coming within about 100 kilometres of the Town of Port Hedland, mayor Kelly Howlett said the district had escaped with minor damage, mostly to the area’s natural landscape.

“We’ve got a lot of cleaning up to do but we were very fortunate,” Cr Howlett said.

“We’ve not seen any bad structural damage, just a few trees down, a lot of sand swept up from the beach and a bit of flooding.”

Cr Howlett said new and updated property development in the region had reduced the number of buildings containing asbestos.

“It’s generally been replaced in the past decade … but there’s still quite a bit.”

She said the town’s asbestos handling and removal safety procedures were “well known” to residents.

“Residents need to get relevant council approval [to remove asbestos material], but they’re quite well versed in that.”

If anybody should understand what caused her lung cancer, it’s New York Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy. The 69-year-old Democrat spent 30 years as a nurse before being elected to the U.S. Congress, and reportedly was a heavy smoker for more than 40 years.

McCarthy’s suit has drawn well-deserved criticism, both for the implausibility of her claims and because her lawyers are the politically connected firm of Weitz & Luxenberg, which employs the speaker of the New York General Assembly, Sheldon Silver. Odds are most of the companies she’s suing will settle for that reason alone.

But McCarthy also illustrates a potentially disturbing new trend for both corporate defendants and the true victims of asbestos-related disease. Having exhausted the pool of mesothelioma claimants, plaintiff lawyers are turning to lung cancer again, reviving a strategy that fell into disuse after courts started removing cases not directly claiming asbestos disease from the docket. They’re filing thousands of cases on behalf of smokers who claim that stray asbestos fibers, not cigarettes, made them sick.

If the strategy works, plaintiff lawyers will succeed in draining bankruptcy trusts set up for the benefit of asbestos victims, leaving less money for people with mesothelioma and asbestosis, which are both directly linked to asbestos exposure. It may even set up a conflict between lawyers who pay millions of dollars for TV and Internet advertising to get the 2,500 or so patients diagnosed with mesothelioma each year, and higher-volume law firms representing lung cancer plaintiffs.

Lung-cancer claims in Madison County, Ill. and Delaware, two of the most active venues for asbestos litigation, have more than doubled since 2010, to more than 600 a year in each court system, according to a new article in Mealey’s Asbestos Bankruptcy Report. Southern California courts are also seeing an upturn. And an analysis of claims in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas found that 75% of the claimants suing over asbestos-related lung cancer revealed a smoking history, with three-quarters of them smoking at least a pack a day for an average of 39 years.

The report, by Peter Kelso and Marc Scarcella of Bates White Economic Consulting and Joseph Cagnoli, a partner with the defense firm of Segal McCambridge Singer & Mahoney, says lung-cancer claims have fluctuated up and down over the years, not because of changes in the rate of cancer — new diagnoses run around 200,000 a year in the U.S. and are declining steadily — but due to “changing economic incentives for plaintiff law firms.”

Lawyers made billions of dollars in the 1980s and 1990s by setting up mobile X-ray screening sites at union halls and other locations with concentrations of industrial workers, l0oking for claimants with lung scarring or other signs of asbestos-related disease. Because lung cancer is clearly caused by smoking, workers with cancer and a history of smoking were considered to have lower-value cases than n0n-smoking workers with asbestosis.

Using a time-honored strategy, lawyers bundled those weak and strong cases together, leveraging larger overall settlements than if the cases were presented separately. The most valuable cases have always involved mesothelioma, a cancer of the chest lining that is closely linked to asbestos exposure (although it clearly has other causes; the death rate has been rising in recent years despite a steep decline in industrial asbestos use since the 1970s.). In one example cited by the authors, G-I HoldingsG-I Holdings settled 160,000 cases in the 1990s in groups of 250 or more, paying out two-thirds of the money to non-mesothelioma claimants.

So-called n0n-malignant cases plunged a decade ago after courts around the country stopped allowing them on their active dockets, thus removing them from the pool of cases lawyers could bundle for settlement. Non-malignant claims fell from 90% of claims and 50% of payments to 2% of settled cases. Mesothelioma grabbed the vast majority of the money from court settlements.

Since lawyers spent an estimated $500-$1,000 per plaintiff for mass screenings, the authors say, the decline of non-malignant claims made it less economically viable to perform mass screenings. One side effect was fewer lung-cancer claims.

But at the same time, many asbestos manufacturers declared bankruptcy and set up trusts, typically under the control of plaintiff lawyers, to pay out claims. Those trusts, now with more than $30 billion in assets, often provide “expedited review” that allows plaintiffs to collect small awards — $4,000 to as little as $250 — with minimal paperwork and no requirement to disclose smoking history.

The authors say the trusts have paid out $1.2 billion in lung-cancer claims since 2009, and estimate that each claimant might hit 20-30 trusts for payment, meaning as much as $106,000 for a case of lung cancer likely caused by smoking. That provides enough fee income for lawyers to start mass screenings again, the authors say. Out of 1,000 workers screened, lawyers could be expected to turn up 40 cancer claims worth about $3 million in fees after expenses, compared with perhaps 10 cases of asbestosis.

Without judicial mechanisms to more carefully vet these cases, they write, “there is nothing preventing plaintiff law firms from bringing mass quantities of meritless lung cancer cases against asbestos defendants.”